Comedian Jerry Lewis dies at 91

Sunday

Aug 20, 2017 at 2:25 PMAug 20, 2017 at 2:48 PM

By DENNIS McLELLAN The Los Angeles Times

Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced comedian who burst onto the post-World War II show-business scene with partner Dean Martin and together became the hottest comedy team of their era before launching his own highly successful solo career a decade later, has died. He was 91.

Lewis died Sunday morning of natural causes in Las Vegas with his family by his side, his publicist Candi Cazau told The Associated Press.

Lewis’ reputation as a comedic filmmaker in America never matched his canonization in France, where he was hailed as a cinematic genius for his self-directed comedies of the 1960s.

Known nearly as much for his philanthropic work as for his comedy the last few decades of his life, Lewis was a Labor Day weekend fixture for 44 years as host of the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon.

From 1966 to 2010, the telethons raised more than $1 billion for what Lewis referred to as “my kids.”

At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2009, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his fund-raising work on behalf of MDA — the reason for which he always refused to say.

“The important thing is that I do it, not the why,” he told The Times some years ago.

In May 2011, Lewis announced that the upcoming Labor Day telethon would be his last as host. But that August, the MDA unexpectedly said the 85-year-old comedian would not appear as host on the telethon and would no longer serve as its national MDA chairman, a position he had held since the 1950s.

“Jerry Lewis is a world-class humanitarian, and we’re forever grateful to him for his more than half century of generous service to MDA,” MDA Chairman of the Board R. Rodney Howell said at the time.

A spokeswoman for Lewis told The Times that the comedian had no comment on his dismissal, which prompted an outcry in some show-business quarters.

“As a fellow comedian, it’s really crappy the way they treated him,” comedian Paul Rodriguez said. “The man is an institution. They should have found a better way to let him go.”

In a show-business career that spanned more than 70 years, Lewis at various times was said to be the highest-paid nightclub comic, television entertainer and film director in the world.

And with Martin for 10 of those years, he was half of what has been called the most successful comedy duo in history.

On stage together, Martin and Lewis were known as a super-charged mix of jokes, routines, singing, dancing and, most notably, ad-libbing.

“I have been in the business 55 years, and I have never to this day seen an act get more laughs than Martin and Lewis,” comedian Alan King once recalled in the New Yorker, decades after seeing the team perform at New York City’s fabled Copacabana nightclub in 1948.